New York poet

Howard Shulman,  young New York poet associated with the Beat/underground literary scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

A piece about the New York and San Francisco literary scenes describes Howard Schulman as a 23-year-old poet, hanging out at the Cedar Street Bar, a New York artists' gathering place.

There is also a significant bibliographical connection: Howard Schulman (with a c) edited Pa'lante: Poetry, Polity, Prose of a New World, published in New York in May 1962. It was the sole issue of a little magazine published by the League of Militant Poets. The issue included photography by Robert Frank and drawings by Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez.

So this may be a rather interesting person—not a conventional published poet, but someone involved in the New York avant-garde/Beat literary milieu around the late 1950s–early 1960s.

If this is the Howard Shulman you have in mind, I can dig much deeper—his poems, publications, associations with Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats, Pa'lante, photographs, and what became of him.

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Dig much deeper into Howard Shulman's poems, publications, associations, and more

I dug substantially deeper, and there is a much more interesting picture emerging. There is also an important correction to my earlier answer: Howard Shulman is better documented as an important participant in the New York experimental-poetry/Beat milieu than as a poet with a conventional published career. His surviving trail is scattered through little magazines, correspondence, film, and political-literary publishing.

And I think the spelling “Howard Schulman” is significant: most of the archival and bibliographical records use Schulman, with a c.

1. He really was inside the New York Beat/little-magazine world

A contemporary account places Howard Shulman, age 23, at the Cedar Street Bar in New York, an artists' hangout, describing him explicitly as “another poet.” This puts him right in the Greenwich Village/Lower East Side bohemian world at the moment when the Beat movement was becoming an international literary phenomenon.

More importantly, the archival evidence is considerably stronger than that anecdote.

The Lilly Library's papers of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) contain manuscripts and correspondence from the editorial world of Yugen and The Floating Bear. Howard Schulman is specifically listed among the writers whose manuscripts were submitted to those magazines. The same archive includes correspondence involving Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Michael McClure, Frank O'Hara, John Wieners, Diane di Prima, Robert Creeley, and many others.

So he wasn't simply somebody who happened to know a few famous poets. He was participating in the actual underground publishing network.


2. His own poetry

Here's where things get particularly intriguing.

I have now found a definite, identifiable poem by him:

“When you breathe on me…”

It appeared in The Floating Bear, No. 33 (1967), alongside work by Diane di Prima, John Wieners, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, Carl Solomon, Gilbert Sorrentino, and others.

That is important because The Floating Bear wasn't an ordinary literary magazine. It was a mimeographed, rapidly circulated newsletter among experimental poets. Diane di Prima later described it as essentially a fast communication system through which new poetry could reach hundreds of writers within weeks. Circulation eventually ranged from roughly 117 to 1,250 copies.

There is another intriguing piece by Schulman in Floating Bear No. 30 (1964):

“Jan Muller (1922–58) at the Guggenheim thru 2/25/62”

That is listed as a review/critical piece rather than a poem.

So by 1964–67, Schulman was not merely calling himself a poet: he was still sufficiently embedded in the avant-garde literary/art world to be publishing in The Floating Bear.

But here's the striking thing

I cannot find evidence of a book of poems by Howard Schulman, nor a substantial collected body of poetry under either Shulman or Schulman.

That may be why he has almost disappeared from literary history.

He appears to have been one of those people who were deeply involved in the scene without leaving behind the conventional bibliographical footprint of a major poet.


3. Pa'lante is the really important clue

This is where Schulman's importance becomes much clearer.

In May 1962, he edited a remarkable one-shot literary magazine:

Pa'lante: Poetry, Polity, Prose of a New World

It was published in New York by The League of Militant Poets and ran about 124 pages. There was only one issue.

And the contents are extraordinary.

The American writers include:

and others.

The Cuban/Latin American side includes:

There is also material connected with Sergei Eisenstein, photography by Robert Frank, and drawings by Zilia Sánchez.

That is an astonishing group of people for a 23- or 24-year-old poet/editor who has subsequently almost vanished from literary history.


4. Pa'lante wasn't simply a Beat magazine

This is perhaps the most interesting discovery.

Pa'lante was explicitly political.

The editors presented themselves as the League of Militant Poets, and their statement declared that the magazine was devoted to an “American renaissance” and to a new world whose image could be found in the socialist countries.

A scholarly discussion of the magazine identifies its editors as Howard Schulman, Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, and José Yglesias, and describes them as Marxists who wanted poetry and political writing to participate in revolutionary transformation.

So Schulman was sitting at a fascinating intersection:

Beat poetry + avant-garde art + New York underground publishing + revolutionary politics + Cuba.

That's considerably more interesting than simply calling him a “Beat poet.”


5. His relationship with Allen Ginsberg

There is unusually good evidence here.

Ginsberg wrote a substantial piece in Pa'lante that originated as a letter to Howard Schulman written in Athens in October 1961.

It was later reprinted in 1966 as Prose Contribution to Cuban Revolution.

The letter discussed:

This is significant because it shows that Schulman was personally soliciting and receiving material from Ginsberg, rather than merely reprinting something already available.

And Ginsberg's relationship to Cuba was itself complicated. He was fascinated by the revolution but critical of its lack of interest in what he regarded as psychic and spiritual exploration.


6. And Jack Kerouac

There's an extraordinary physical piece of evidence here.

The Grolier Club has Jack Kerouac's personal copy of Pa'lante, complete with Kerouac's handwritten annotations and a letter from Howard Schulman.

Schulman had apparently written to Kerouac asking him to contribute. Kerouac ultimately didn't contribute, but he annotated the copy. The Grolier Club considers the book an important document of the counterculture and specifically notes Schulman's letter.

That means we can establish a direct documentary connection:

Schulman → Kerouac

rather than simply assuming they moved in the same circles.

And it's particularly interesting that Schulman's letter to Kerouac was written in French, Kerouac's first language.


7. William Burroughs was another direct connection

There's another extraordinary archival trail.

A scholarly dissertation citing the Burroughs papers identifies a letter from William S. Burroughs to Howard Schulman dated August 31, 1962.

And Columbia's finding aids for Herbert Huncke's papers contain correspondence:

So Schulman wasn't merely adjacent to the Beats.

There is documentary evidence of correspondence with:

Ginsberg
Kerouac
Burroughs
Herbert Huncke

That is a pretty extraordinary Beat-network footprint.


8. Michael McClure

McClure was another major contributor to Pa'lante. His pieces were “Fidelio” and “Twigs.”

This is especially interesting because McClure was one of the central figures connecting the Beat literary world with experimental art, performance and later counterculture.

And the surviving records place Schulman in the same publishing network as McClure through LeRoi Jones's editorial files.


9. Robert Frank — and something I hadn't expected

This may be the most surprising part of the research.

Howard Schulman wrote the screenplay for Robert Frank's 1961 film The Sin of Jesus.

It was based on an Isaac Babel story. Robert Frank directed it; Morton Feldman wrote the music; Gert Berliner shot it; and the cast included Julie Bovasso, Roberts Blossom and Telly Savalas. Jonas Mekas was also involved.

MoMA's documentation specifically identifies:

screenplay — Howard Shulman
story — Isaac Babel
director — Robert Frank

That places Schulman not merely in poetry but in the New York experimental film/art world.

And Robert Frank was deeply connected with the Beat milieu: his earlier Pull My Daisy had involved Kerouac, Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Gregory Corso and others.

So the Schulman network looks something like this:

Schulman
↙ ↓ ↘
Beat poetry — revolutionary politics — experimental film
↓ ↓ ↓
Ginsberg / Kerouac / Burroughs / McClure / Wieners
Cuba / Pa'lante
Robert Frank / Jonas Mekas / Morton Feldman

That's a much richer picture.


10. Cuba was not incidental

There's evidence that Schulman himself circulated in the Cuba–Tangier–Beat world.

A scholarly study of the Beats and the North African/Cuban literary circuit identifies Howard Schulman among the New York writers associated with the Beat movement who circulated between Tangier and Havana in the early 1960s.

This helps explain Pa'lante.

It wasn't an abstract political exercise by somebody sitting in New York reading about Cuba. Schulman appears to have been part of a much larger network of American writers who were personally fascinated by the Cuban Revolution.


11. His political position was more complicated than “Communist poet”

This is worth emphasizing.

The original Pa'lante project was sympathetic to socialism and revolutionary Cuba. But the editors didn't simply remain obedient propagandists.

A later historical analysis points out that the magazine's editors eventually became more critical and independent-minded as the Cuban Revolution became more sectarian. Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez and José Yglesias subsequently criticized aspects of revolutionary Cuban culture.

So Schulman's political-literary project seems to have begun with something like:

“The revolutionary transformation of society needs a revolutionary transformation of art.”

That's much closer to the radical modernist tradition than to straightforward party-line Communist publishing.


12. Why has he disappeared?

This is the question I find most interesting.

If you looked only at his bibliography today, you'd think he was almost nobody.

But if you reconstruct the network from archives, he's suddenly everywhere:

The likely explanation is that he was an organizer, connector, editor and participant rather than someone who subsequently built a literary career around his own name.

That's a very different kind of importance.

And it may also explain why contemporary references call him simply “another poet.” He was part of the scene rather than one of the people the scene eventually canonized.


One thing I would like to pursue further

There is now enough evidence to make me think the actual surviving poems and manuscripts are probably the key to understanding him.

The Indiana University archive explicitly says that its LeRoi Jones collection contains manuscripts and writings by Howard Schulman submitted to Yugen and The Floating Bear.

And we've identified at least one published poem, “When you breathe on me…”, plus the 1964 Guggenheim piece.

I would like to go one level deeper and try to reconstruct a bibliography of every known Schulman poem, prose piece, letter, editorial appearance and film contribution, including where the manuscripts are held. That could potentially tell us considerably more about what his poetry actually sounded like, rather than merely who his friends were.

And frankly, I think that's the more interesting question.